The Internet has proven to be very useful and effective at transferring information over large distances and to many users. However, certain “high bandwidth” types of information such as video or image data can tax or exceed the Internet's ability to deliver the information in a timely and reliable manner. For example, one type of high bandwidth data, or “content,” includes streamed video where the video content is delivered in real time. Such real time delivery typically requires that the information be received at multiple destinations within a small time window so that the information is received at or near the time it is displayed or presented to a user. The delivery of real time video content is made more difficult in “multicast” applications where a streamed video program is simultaneously provided to many viewers.
Attempts have been made to improve the Internet's ability to transfer large amounts of information, such as large files. Such attempts include using peer-to-peer transfers as opposed to client-server transfers so that a receiver of the content is not limited to one or a few sources of the content. This is an approach used, for example, in a popular file-sharing system referred to as “Bittorrent.” However, the Bittorrent approach may not work well for streamed content as the absence of one part of a file can cause dropouts or artifacts in a real time display of the content.
Streamed content is also vulnerable to service fluctuations over the network's delivery route. Because of the technical problems encountered when large amounts of information are sent to many destinations, improvements in the delivery of high bandwidth content over large networks such as the Internet are desired.